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I need a sanity check on this .htaccess (from a WordPress site) I inherited from a 5 month+ old site. What's the symptom? Google + Bing crawl, but don't index any of the pages. Let me be clear: I'm not mad about "not ranking high." I think something is (accidentally) rejecting search engine indexing.

I am not an expert on .htaccess, but one part especially looked funny, the Limit GET POST line. Is it not weird to have both Allow and Deny all, with no parameters?

Also, I've ruled out robots.txt, but if I were you I'd want to see it, so here it is:

User-agent:  *
Crawl-delay:  30

And here's the more suspect .htaccess:

# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/anonymousblog  [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule>

# temp redirect wordpress comment feeds to feedburner
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$    http://feeds.feedburner.com/anonymous_comments [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>

php_value memory_limit 32M

Adding header by request:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta name="description" content="buncha junk i've deleted." />
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords i've deleted" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

1 Answer 1

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Post your website's header code too. You want to make sure you're not doing something silly like this:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

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  • Added it, and boy it does look suspicious! According to what I just Googled, you're right on the money. But why the heck didn't Google Webmaster Tools mention it...
    – jose
    Jun 12, 2012 at 20:35
  • Delete this line: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> ...and you're good to go. If there is no robots <META> tag the default is "INDEX,FOLLOW".
    – utt73
    Jun 12, 2012 at 20:43

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